“When churches aspire for relevance, they tend to fall into marketing language,” she said (in what became an interview in our sister publication Leadership). “It’s all around us. Most of the language of marketing is meant to mislead.”
She recalled a prayer of confession once used in her church, which began, “Our communication with Jesus tends to be too infrequent to experience the transformation in our lives you want us to have.”
“That is evasive,” Norris said. “It’s not a confession. It’s a memo—a memo from one executive to another.” When we use such language to address God, she continued, we shortchange the mystery: “One of the reasons people come to church is to hear real language. And that means it’s not the kind of language they hear on the job or when they turn on the television sets.”
If the church doesn’t give people real language, she said, they go home a little hungry. What she said next especially caught my attention: “The church needs to give people ‘memorable speech’ (as one poet put it). The Scriptures provide that royally. There’s all sorts of memorable speech in the Psalms and the Gospels.”
This is one reason set prayers—as found in The Book of Common Prayer and the daily office of many traditions—are so attractive to so many evangelicals and charismatics: such services are full of Scriptural language (see “A Vespers Service,” p. 43, as an example). It’s also one reason Mennonite pastor Art Boers set off on an extraordinary trip to visit Taizé, Iona, Northumbria, and other centers that promote common prayer, as it is sometimes called. “Learning the Ancient Rhythms” (p. 38) is the account of what he discovered.
The virtue of bias
“The Peace Regress: What’s behind the current outbreak of hostilities in the Holy Land?” (p. 66) is written by a Palestinian Christian lawyer who does not try to pretend he is neutral on the situation. When this unsolicited piece came to our office, we immediately recognized its one-sidedness—and decided to publish it anyway.First, the piece will help North American readers understand the events and concerns that ignited the recent flare-ups. Readers like me need repeated primers on such complex events that are both physically and psychologically far away. To that end, our new assistant editor, Agnieszka Tennant (to be fully introduced in a later issue), pulled together a timeline and found a map that will help clarify the issues.
Second, we’re hearing a decidedly pro-Palestinian point of view (though the author is not shy about criticizing things Palestinian). In issues as divisive as political sovereignty in the Holy Land, it is difficult to write articles that do full justice to all the issues. Better, we think, to let both sides explain the situation from their point of view and let you, the readers, figure out what you think.
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Next issue: The Simpsons’ Ned Flanders—The Evangelical Next Door.
Also: Senior Writer Wendy Murray Zoba on The Mission-Trip Phenomenon, Corrie Cutrer reports on Revival in Nigeria, and new columns by Andy Crouch (editor of re:generation quarterly) and Stephen Carter (author of The Culture of Disbelief and God’s Name in Vain).
